Apr 6, 2018 4 min read

We’ve all seen it. You look into a passing vehicle, and the driver isn’t looking at the road. They’re looking at their lap. Could it be they’ve dropped a piece of food? Maybe an ash from a cigarette? That’s possible, but in this day and age, it’s much more likely that they are gazing at or pecking away at their smartphone.

Pennsylvania has a law against texting while driving, and while it doesn’t go nearly far enough in the fight against distracted driving, it is having some effect.

According to a report the other day in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, based on data released by the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, citations issued by police for distracted driving have risen significantly over the past five years.

Across the state in 2017, police filed 5,054 citations for distracted driving, which includes texting, use of a hand-held cellphone by commercial drivers and the wearing of headphones or earphones while behind the wheel.

That’s an increase of 51 percent over the 3,336 citations issued in 2016, and 172 percent more than the number of charges in 2013.

According to the P-G report, there was no accompanying analysis of the data, but Pennsylvania State Police, responsible for 45 percent of the citations, believe part of the reason for the rising number is the work by troopers across the commonwealth.

“Certainly, I believe a part of the increase is due to law enforcement detecting violators more efficiently,” state police spokesman Cpl. Andrew Reed told the P-G. “Another reason might simply be that more people feel the continuous need to stay connected, even when they are behind the wheel, thus leading to more people texting and driving.”

While we applaud the rising number of citations, we also must recognize that this is a mere drop in the bucket when compared with the number of people who are using their phones or other devices while behind the wheel, and it’s also a fact that distracted driving is still killing thousands of Americans every year.

In 2015, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, nearly 3,500 people were killed and close to 400,000 were injured in crashes involving distracted drivers.

The NHTSA says that during daylight hours, about 660,000 drivers are using cellphones while behind the wheel on any given day. If that isn’t frightening to you, it should be, and Pennsylvania hasn’t done nearly enough to confront this problem.

The current law here prohibits drivers from sending, reading or writing texts or emails, but the fine is a mere $50, which is hardly a major deterrent, and the law fails to address the use of cellphones to make calls.

There was a study more than a decade ago that found drivers carrying on conversations on phones, be they hand-held or hands-free, presented a risk similar to that of drunken drivers. Some might argue drivers do all kinds of things behind the wheel that might distract them, but punching a button on the radio and carrying on a 20-minute conversation while driving, especially on a hand-held phone, clearly present two different levels of risk.

We’ve advocated for this before, and at this point, we may very well be flogging a dearly departed equine, but if our state legislators and our governor really cared about making our roads safer for travel by all motorists, they would enact a much tougher law outlawing the use of all phones and similar “screened” devices by drivers, whether for texting, calls or any other use, except in the case of emergencies. They also would boost the fine significantly.

Inattention by drivers can be deadly, but so can inattention by our lawmakers.